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Senior Systems Engineer at Dimension Data
MSP
Top 5
Integrates well, scalable, and quick deployment
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable features of the Amazon S3 are its ease of use and integration"
  • "Amazon S3 could improve the limitation on how much data can be stored."

What is our primary use case?

We are using Amazon S3  for short-term or long-term storage.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features of the Amazon S3 are its ease of use and integration

What needs improvement?

Amazon S3 could improve the limitation on how much data can be stored.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Amazon S3 for approximately two years.

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Amazon S3
December 2024
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Amazon S3 is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability of Amazon S3 is good.

Our company uses Amazon S3 as the main target backup solution.

How are customer service and support?

I did not use the support from Amazon S3 because we never faced any challenges.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I have used other similar solutions to Amazon S3, but they are not comparable.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup of Amazon S3 is straightforward, the process took a few minutes.

What about the implementation team?

We did the implementation of Amazon S3 in-house. We used one engineer for the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

What was our ROI?

I have seen a return on investment. The cost is based on a consumption-based model, you only pay for your usage.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The price of Amazon S3 depends on various variables. However, the price overall is fair.

What other advice do I have?

I rate Amazon S3 a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
reviewer1926564 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Member Of Technical Staff at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Useful life cycle policies, highly stable, and simple setup
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable features of Amazon S3 are the accuracy and the life cycle policies, which help when moving from Amazon S3 to Amazon Glacier."
  • "Amazon S3 could improve some of the features, such as indexing, or we should have more information about all the data stored in a single place. This way we can see what data resides where instead of going in different buckets, file locations manually, or searching. An index would be nice, allowing us to directly go to a location to use the date."

What is our primary use case?

I am using Amazon S3 for storing all the organization data, which comes from a data pipeline.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features of Amazon S3 are the accuracy and the life cycle policies, which helps when moving from Amazon S3 to Amazon Glacier.

What needs improvement?

Amazon S3 could improve some of the features, such as indexing, or we should have more information about all the data stored in a single place. This way we can see what data resides where instead of going in different buckets, file locations manually, or searching. An index would be nice, allowing us to directly go to a location to use the date.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used Amazon S3 within the last 12 months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Amazon S3 is 99.99 percent stable. The solution is highly stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability of Amazon S3 is good. If we want more storage we only need to pay extra.

All the workloads of the whole company go to Amazon S3. As our workloads increase, the data increases, and we will use more storage in Amazon S3.

How are customer service and support?

I have not used the support from Amazon S3.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I have not used another solution similar to Amazon S3.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup of Amazon S3 is not complex. We are only using it for a storage layer and there were not any complexities.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The cost of Amazon S3 is good. The pricing model is based on the usage of the solution.

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend this solution to others, it is one of the most used storage solutions.

I rate Amazon S3 a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Amazon S3
December 2024
Learn what your peers think about Amazon S3. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.
824,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.
reviewer1938171 - PeerSpot reviewer
Bussiness Data Enigineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Low latency, reliable, and simple to maintain
Pros and Cons
  • "The storage factor and data extraction are faster because we can use Redshift for extraction."
  • "The installation could be more straightforward for inexperienced users."

What is our primary use case?

We use Amazon S3 for data extraction because a few of the source information for our organization requires us to rely on it for any data point input.

Because it was only mined for the purpose of data extraction.

What is most valuable?

I think it is reasonably good.

What needs improvement?

It's difficult to say because I've only been working with it for six months.

The installation could be more straightforward for inexperienced users.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Amazon S3 for six months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Amazon S3 is a stable solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We were limited to two people because pricing is a consideration.

I'm not sure, because as a team, we use it, but I'm not sure how many there should be in the company.

We have four on our team.

How are customer service and support?

We have not contacted technical support.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is moderate. It's neither easy nor difficult. It is reasonable. Because it depends on the individual, I suppose, but my usage is moderate.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I am not sure about the pricing. I have seen the pricing on AWS, but I believe it's a discount price for organizations. I wouldn't know because that is something confidential between the company and AWS.

What other advice do I have?

My advice is to use it. The storage factor and data extraction are faster because we can use Redshift for extraction. It has very low latency.

I would rate Amazon S3 an eight out of ten because we are on the cloud, and again, from an organizational standpoint, it is beneficial even for data maintenance

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
reviewer1369422 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Beneficial automation, useful CLI, and simple implementation
Pros and Cons
  • "Amazon S3 is easy to use and it is beneficial to use the CLI to make the backups. Since I use the CLI I do not have to do it on a web portal which is a big advantage because everything can be automatized. Automation can be done very well in Amazon S3."
  • "The solution could improve by having a simpler way to have the detail size of a file in the CLI to be read or understood easier. Today, it's a little raw in the way the details are presented. You have to make some scripts and some modifications to be able to see the information properly of the size of a given bucket or the size of a file."

What is our primary use case?

I use Amazon S3 mainly for daily backups of our database.

How has it helped my organization?

Amazon S3 has helped our organization because the daily backups can be done automatically with automation. We do not have to spend time on it and I am confident with Amazon S3 in its ability to recover our data.

What is most valuable?

Amazon S3 is easy to use and it is beneficial to use the CLI to make the backups. Since I use the CLI I do not have to do it on a web portal which is a big advantage because everything can be automatized. Automation can be done very well in Amazon S3.

What needs improvement?

The solution could improve by having a simpler way to have the detail size of a file in the CLI to be read or understood easier. Today, it's a little raw in the way the details are presented. You have to make some scripts and some modifications to be able to see the information properly of the size of a given bucket or the size of a file.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Amazon S3 for a long time. I used the latest version because the CLI is normally updated.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability of the Amazon S3 is good.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability of Amazon S3 is great.

We are a small company and we have approximately five developers that use Amazon S3. We use the solution on a daily basis for hourly backups.

How are customer service and support?

I have used the support from Amazon S3 a long time ago, I have not needed much help. When I did have contact with them there were times it took a while for a response.

I would rate the technical support of Amazon S3 a three out of five.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

The main difference from other solutions I have used is Amazon is the leader, and it has a very large number of zones and capacity, while others can be smaller and can have different options. Not all the options that are available in Amazon S3 are offered by other competitors, but for the main features, most of them are working fine. I have been evaluating two different solutions, one from a French cloud-based company called Scaleway, and the other is peer-to-peer storage.

How was the initial setup?

The installation was simple. Creating a new bucket and deploying it is very straightforward. To make the script deploy a new bucket takes approximately one hour. 

I would rate the initial setup of Amazon S3 a four out of five.

What about the implementation team?

We did the implementation ourselves and we have two developers that do the maintenance of the solution.

What was our ROI?

The return on investment has been very good because the backups of our database are critical for our business to operate.

I would rate the return on investment of Amazon S3 a four out of five.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The price of the Amazon S3 is reasonable. There are not any licensing costs, they have a pay-as-you-use model. 

When backups are more than 6 months old, I would recommend keeping less of them and storing the remaining ones in Glacier (long-term, cheaper storage).

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I have evaluated other options.

What other advice do I have?

My advice to others is to separate the buckets project, not to put everything in the same bucket, and be sure to implement IAM rules to avoid problems between users and not to lose any backups. The implementation process is important. 

I rate Amazon S3 an eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Google
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Moses NYOTA - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software and Cloud Engineer at Velocis Technologies LLC
Real User
Quick and easy to deploy with good reliability
Pros and Cons
  • "Technical support is excellent."
  • "If a certain resource is left unchecked, you can easily use a lot of it and drive up costs."

What is our primary use case?

We are making custom applications to the cloud.

We are service providers.

In terms of use cases, where a company wants to deploy their applications instead of building their servers on the premise, on the company premise. They can just, instead of buying servers and setting up networks and everything, buy space online on the AWS cloud. That way, you don't have to buy an expensive server. You already have servers online. You deploy your application. That's the main use case we are handling now. For example, if you have an in-house ERP, you want to move everything to the cloud. We migrate clients, for example. from on-premise to the cloud. If you have heavy tasks, there are computations that require heavy, powerful machines.

What is most valuable?

The solution is stable and reliable.

It’s easy to set up.

Technical support is excellent.

Amazon, especially its cloud, is the best on the market.

It can lower costs as you won’t need physical hardware on-site.

What needs improvement?

Regarding S3, S2, and E2, all I'd recommend is for pricing to be lower since we can easily overuse them. For example, if a certain resource is left unchecked, you can easily use a lot of it and drive up costs.

For how long have I used the solution?

We’ve used the solution for a while.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

AWS is very, very stable. It's actually the most stable cloud service for S3, for all the services provided on the cloud. They're very stable. However, compared to others, they are costly.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We started this year, so we haven't gone much into it. We became partners this year. Right now, we only have one client that we have recently started locally in Kenya.

How are customer service and support?

The tech support is good. It's perfect.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is very straightforward. AWS is the easiest to set up. It's the best actually among the cloud providers. It’s number one compared to Google Cloud, Oracle, or Microsoft Azure.

It took a few hours to set up.

What about the implementation team?

We are integrators. We are able to handle the setup ourselves.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Their prices are higher than say Microsoft Azure or Google. So AWS is very easy to use yet expensive.

Licensing is pay as you go. The more resources you use, the more you pay, however, they seem to be more costly than competitors.

What other advice do I have?

We have two options for the cloud. We can choose Oracle Cloud or AWS. We take what is suitable depending on the plan and the cost implications.

We became AWS partners this year.

I’d recommend this and any other AWS product to others.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Integrator
PeerSpot user
Shaamil Ashraff - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect - Database Administration at Mitra Innovation
Real User
Top 5
Easy to install with good security and helpful support
Pros and Cons
  • "The multi-zone replication is great."
  • "We would like Amazon to reduce the price of storage."

What is our primary use case?

One of our clients required certain files to be processed and stored. As another separate service, they wanted a separate integration to capture those files or pull those files. As a storage location, we used S3. It was cloud storage between two services. It was an integration between two services.

What is most valuable?

Security-wise, it's very good. The scalability and availability are great.

The installation is easy.

It's a stable solution. 

The multi-zone replication is great.

Technical support is helpful. 

What needs improvement?

We would like Amazon to reduce the price of storage. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for eight months. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable and the performance is good. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution can scale very well. 

Almost all of our clients use S3 for different requirements, however, I have gotten involved for about eight months with one client.

How are customer service and support?

Overall Amazon support has been very helpful. When we have queries, when we have challenges, they were responsive. I'm a happy customer of Amazon support.

How was the initial setup?

We found the initial setup to be very straightforward. There is not any cumbersome configuration. It's very, very straightforward and easy to implement.

The deployment took a few hours. That includes handling the security configuration.

You only need one or two people for deployment and maintenance. 

What about the implementation team?

As an implementor, I can help a client with the setup.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Amazon should work to revamp its pricing structure so that pricing comes down. 

What other advice do I have?

I'm an implementor. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten due to its scalability and availability. It also allows multi-zone replications. I would recommend this to customers - especially those that are geographically diverse. Companies like this should consider S3 as shared storage or for integrations required for file transfers and between multiple zones.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Implementer
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
OS, Network and Storage Firmware Specialist at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Vendor
I used the solution to prove my concept before deploying it on real hardware
Pros and Cons
  • "Set up a performance and stress-based test suite to measure the endurance of a web application on Amazon AWS cloud system using S3 as the back-end storage infrastructure."
  • "I used Amazon AWS/S3 solution to prove my concept before deploying it on real hardware. It was a great experience and was really scalable."
  • "The down side is the web app should be aware of all the features that S3 provides in order to leverage its full potential."
  • "Maybe they need to expand their range of physical locations."

What is our primary use case?

Set up a performance and stress-based test suite to measure the endurance of a web application on Amazon AWS cloud system using S3 as the back-end storage infrastructure. 

How has it helped my organization?

In order to test application and measure its performance, it is not possible to buy the real hardware at the infant stage of product development. Hence, I used Amazon AWS/S3 solution to prove my concept before deploying it on real hardware. It was a great experience and was really scalable.

What is most valuable?

S3 provides various other ways than what a traditional web app provides. The down side is the web app should be aware of all the features that S3 provides in order to leverage its full potential.

What needs improvement?

It is a great product now. Maybe they need to expand their range of physical locations.

For how long have I used the solution?

One to three years.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
reviewer851175 - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Deliery Manager at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
Real User
Top 5Leaderboard
A strong cloud storage solution, that is easy to use, but has a high price point
Pros and Cons
  • "We appreciate that this solution is relatively easy to use, straightforward, and reliable."
  • "We would like some improvement in the cost of storage via this solution, as it currently has a very high price point."

What is our primary use case?

We use this solution for cloud-based data storage.

What is most valuable?

We appreciate that this solution is relatively easy to use, straightforward, and reliable.

What needs improvement?

We would like some improvement in the cost of storage via this solution, as it currently has a very high price point.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been working with this solution for more than eight years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have found this to be a very stable solution during our time using it.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

This is a very easily scalable solution.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support for this solution are good, and have okay response times whenever we raise issues with them.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We previously used other data storage software. However, because this solution is straightforward to use, and our workload is in Amazon, it was more efficient to switch to this solution than using other tools. 

How was the initial setup?

The setup of this solution is very simple, but just like any other software, there is a learning curve for those who are not yet familiar with the tool.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented this solution using our in-house team.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Amazon S3 Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: December 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Amazon S3 Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.